Making Corporate Social Responsibility Fit: From Idea to Implementation

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Abstract

Responding to changing social expectations about corporate behavior,
mining companies have adopted Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) in a
strategic effort to manage stakeholder impacts, undertaking initiatives that
highlight sustainability in order to unite diverse stakeholders around a common
interest. This constitutes an industry-wide attempt to re-image the industry as
one that cares about its social and environmental impacts and one that is
responsive to public concern in order to secure legitimacy and a social license to
operate. However, industry efforts are often criticized as superficial. Now that
CSR has established a framework for discussing the mining industry's social
impacts, opportunities exists for industry, academia, and community to
collaboratively deepen the conceptualization of "responsibility" and "impact" by
focusing on the broad social questions about business and society, whose
impetus gave rise to CSR. In order for this to happen, future academic research
should concentrate on contributing anthropological and sociological
interpretations of CSR to the existing economic and business ones, documenting
community perspectives, studying the structure and culture of mining
corporations, and creating interdisciplinary research projects that synthesize
multiple interpretations and perspectives. In this report, a general exploration of
the CSR, its elusive definition, its conceptual roots in broad questions about the
relationship between business and society in the 1950's and 1960's, its
relationship to stakeholder theory, and its business-case appeal, provides the
background for a more in depth discussion of its place within the mining industry.